(April 1, 2013 at 8:43 pm)jstrodel Wrote: 1. If something exists, there must exist what it takes for that thing to exist.
2. God is self sufficient, and requires no more cause to exist than God's own existence
Why it is unreasonable to believe that God's existence is subject to a different understanding of causality than peoples?
2 directly contradicts 1. If 2 is true, 1 cannot be true. If 1 is not true, then the whole exercise is futile, because we must accept that something can exist without a cause. Therefore, universe. And tooth fairies.
Why even bother trying to build a logical chain if your second link is an exclusion that breaks the chain? To paraphrase the little bald kid in The Matrix, there is no chain. And therefore, no logic. And therefore, the only conditions under which god can exist.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould